Q&A for Teens: People Connection

With a few precious minutes, you can change a kid’s life.

There’s a kid who lives across the street from me, and he seems kind of sad and lonely. But he’s much younger than I am, and I’m just not sure if there’s anything I can do for him, even though I want to. Any advice?

Lauren Roth's Answer

I made an absolutely awesome, healthful, incredibly delicious, and intensely beautiful dinner tonight.

There was a wooden bowl filled with dark green fresh raw spinach leaves, a blue bowl of deep purple-colored cabbage with fresh-squeezed lemon juice, which made the dark purple cabbage exude a lavender/dusty-pink colored juice, a plate of heirloom baby tomatoes which were orange and light red and bright red and light yellow and spring green, in interesting shapes, like pear-shaped and round and watermelon-shaped…tan chick peas in that awesome chick-pea shape (!), bright green broccoli and bright white cauliflower garnished with bright green parsley, orange steamed carrots with yellow and green steamed baby patty squashes, and golden, crispy baked schnitzel. For dessert, we had steaming mugs of light green, slightly sweetened mint tea. Yummmm. Oh, and on the table were pink and green and white hydrangeas floating in a glass bowl of clear water. Niiiice.

Why am I telling you this? (No, it’s not because you accidentally clicked onto Bon Apetit.com instead of Aish.com.)

I am telling you this because I really love all of you, my readers, out there, even though I don’t know you personally. I wish I could invite all of you over to my house for dinner. But I can’t, so at least I can give you the gift of sharing dinner with us in your imagination.

Erich Fromm, eminent psychologist and philosopher, explains in The Art of Loving that the deepest need of humans is to connect with other people. If I made an amazing dinner and only I ate it, I would enjoy it, but a deep psychological/spiritual/emotional need is filled when I share my dinner/description of the amazing dinner I prepared…my painting/my cancer research/my sonata/my novel/my friendship/a beautiful vista…etc… with another human. If you connect with your young neighbor, that connection can fill a deep need in him.

The fact that the neighbor in question is young and you are older reminds me of Don Pelts. Don Pelts was just about the nicest man I have ever had the pleasure to know. He was my parents’ good friend, and he died last week.

Two things strike me about Don, and I’m going to use both of them to answer your question. One: even when I was seven years old, he spoke to me like I was another adult. His daughter was my age, and he would listen to our ideas, praise our ideas, tell us jokes, involve us in the adult conversation, ask about our school and our teachers and our friends—and really pay attention to our answers. He made us feel like real people. Like people who mattered. Long before I was old enough to read How to Win Friends and Influence People in order to know how to connect with others, I was learning how to sincerely engage other people from Don Pelts.

To this day, because of how great it made me feel when he interacted with me and his daughter as if we mattered, I greet all the children on our block and engage them when I walk past them. He taught me that even little people immensely enjoy being treated like people.

The other salient point about Don is this, and this point also speaks to your query: he was the owner and CEO of the wildly successful Corky’s Barbeque. And his passing gave me pause to think: what will I have given the world when my time comes?

You have a tremendous opportunity to take a few moments of your life to change a kid’s life.

Every moment, we have a choice: what will I give the world this moment? You have a tremendous opportunity to take a few moments of your life to change a kid’s life. You have a tremendous gift that you can give this kid. Why not give it, Don Pelts-style? That is, by making that kid feel like he matters?

When I heard the news about Don’s passing, I immediately picked up the phone and called my Aunt Joan and Uncle Phillip and my Aunt Diane and Uncle Larry and my Aunt Doris and Uncle Butch (those are not my real uncles and aunts, but in the South we give close friends relational appellations), to thank them; those were the other people in my life who taught me how to make children feel important and respected—by giving me respect and loving attention when I was a kid.

I cannot tell you how much these older individuals shaped my life and my behaviors because they treated me like I was a real person. It’s almost like God put your neighbor right across the street from you to give you this opportunity to change his life for the better.

You don’t have to be an adult to make kids feel great. The best support and succor and source of strength for a child is often a doting older sibling, a caring older cousin, or a kind older neighbor. You can be a kid and still make kids feel great about themselves, like Don Pelts and my “aunts and uncles” did for me. You don’t have to be an adult to do it. We leave our legacies moment by moment, by connecting meaningfully with other people, no matter what our age.

So wave and smile at your neighbor across the street. Tell him you like his basketball shot. Tell another neighbor you like her jump rope pizzazz. Read a book to your younger sibling. Tell them you like their style. Go hug your mother. Go sit with your father. Take a bike ride together. Have a Shabbos meal together. Learn something together. Bring your young neighbor a pizza to share together.

Use your moments well, to connect meaningfully with other people. You can make a difference to a child simply by connecting with him. “Oh, very young, what will you leave us this time? You’re only dancing on this earth for a short while.”

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About the Author

Lauren Roth, MSW, LSW, is a graduate of Princeton University, a Marriage and Parenting Therapist in private practice in Lakewood, New Jersey, and an inspirational speaker across North America and on the high seas. She is the weekly "Dear Dr. Lauren" columnist for Ami Magazine. Mrs. Roth and her husband, Rabbi Dr. Daniel Roth, are the parents of six children.

The opinions expressed in the comment section are the personal views of the commenters. Comments are moderated, so please keep it civil.

Visitor Comments: 3

(3)
Yael,
May 31, 2013 2:40 PM

Spot on, Lauren!

I am an adult who makes the effort to say hi to all the young kids on my block and beyond. I compliment their clothes, haircuts, bikes, smiles... I say good Shabbos to them and look at them, not only their parents. They love it and even call out to me before I have the chance to say hi. Even the shy ones eventually get into it. How did I come to do this? I was a sensitive child and it bothered me to be invisible. I won't go into details, but as Lauren learned from Don Pelts, people need to be noticed personally, individually. I do it for others and lo and behold! it makes MY life happy, too!

(2)
Jolie Greiff,
May 31, 2013 12:24 AM

Final quote

Wasn't that last quote from a Cat Stevens song? Even though he goes by some Muslim name these days, I still love his music, and his words.

(1)
shira,
May 26, 2013 9:48 PM

amazing

That is a special mixture of compassion and responsibility. To hone in and not pass that by. You never know the positive ripple effects you can create by just showing your neighbor you care. B'hatzlacha

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I've been striving to get more into spirituality. But it seems that every time I make some progress, I find myself slipping right back to where I started. I'm getting discouraged and feel like a failure. Can you help?

The Aish Rabbi Replies:

Spiritual slumps are a natural part of spiritual growth. There is a cycle that people go through when at times they feel closer to God and at times more distant. In the words of the Kabbalists, it is "two steps forward and one step back." So although you feel you are slipping, know that this is a natural process. The main thing is to look at your overall progress (over months or years) and be able to see how far you've come!

This is actually God's ingenious way of motivating us further. The sages compare this to teaching a baby how to walk. When the parent is holding on, the baby shrieks with delight and is under the illusion that he knows how to walk. Yet suddenly, when the parent lets go, the child panics, wobbles and may even fall.

At such times when we feel spiritually "down," that is often because God is letting go, giving us the great gift of independence. In some ways, these are the times when we can actually grow the most. For if we can move ourselves just a little bit forward, we truly acquire a level of sanctity that is ours forever.

Here is a practical tool to help pull you out of the doldrums. The Sefer HaChinuch speaks about a great principle in spiritual growth: "The external awakens the internal." This means that although we may not experience immediate feelings of closeness to God, eventually, by continuing to conduct ourselves in such a manner, this physical behavior will have an impact on our spiritual selves and will help us succeed. (A similar idea is discussed by psychologists who say: "Smile and you will feel happy.")

That is the power of Torah commandments. Even if we may not feel like giving charity or praying at this particular moment, by having a "mitzvah" obligation to do so, we are in a framework to become inspired. At that point we can infuse that act of charity or prayer with all the meaning and lift it can provide. But if we'd wait until being inspired, we might be waiting a very long time.

May the Almighty bless you with the clarity to see your progress, and may you do so with joy.

In 1940, a boatload 1,600 Jewish immigrants fleeing Hitler's ovens was denied entry into the port of Haifa; the British deported them to the island of Mauritius. At the time, the British had acceded to Arab demands and restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine. The urgent plight of European Jewry generated an "illegal" immigration movement, but the British were vigilant in denying entry. Some ships, such as the Struma, sunk and their hundreds of passengers killed.

If you seize too much, you are left with nothing. If you take less, you may retain it (Rosh Hashanah 4b).

Sometimes our appetites are insatiable; more accurately, we act as though they were insatiable. The Midrash states that a person may never be satisfied. "If he has one hundred, he wants two hundred. If he gets two hundred, he wants four hundred" (Koheles Rabbah 1:34). How often have we seen people whose insatiable desire for material wealth resulted in their losing everything, much like the gambler whose constant urge to win results in total loss.

People's bodies are finite, and their actual needs are limited. The endless pursuit for more wealth than they can use is nothing more than an elusive belief that they can live forever (Psalms 49:10).

The one part of us which is indeed infinite is our neshamah (soul), which, being of Divine origin, can crave and achieve infinity and eternity, and such craving is characteristic of spiritual growth.

How strange that we tend to give the body much more than it can possibly handle, and the neshamah so much less than it needs!